12:41 am - wherein brett claims he was't drunk...
Jill bought a bunny. It's a black and white Dutch bunny. It doesn't have a name yet.
I'm sure she'll be posting pictures in her journal soon.
I have been microblogging on identi.ca. Also Twitter, but identi.ca is mo betta.
The first act (flash) of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._HorriblDoogie Howser Doctor Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Tightpants Hammer, and Felicia Day as Penny, Doctor Horrible's love interest.
The second part will be up on the 17th, and the third on the 19th. Then they'll all be taken offline on the 20th (at midnight, so basically the 21st), and then I guess they'll be on iTunes or something, and later, on DVD with "the finest and bravest extras in all the land". So you should probably watch it now unless you want to pay for it or whatever.
My first exposure to Geroge Carlin was Al Sleet, the hippy dippy weatherman, which I thought was hysterical.
The temperature at the airport is 88 degrees...which is stupid, man, because I don't know anyone who lives at the airport. Tonight's forecast...dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning.
Apparently there is a musician called Girl Talk which consists of one guy who "specializes in sample-based remixes, in which he uses at least a dozen elements from different songs to create a "new" song". I've never heard of him before, but I saw a link on reddit that said he was releasing a new album called "Feed The Animals" In Rainbows style. That is, allowing anyone to download the album for any price they want. Apparently $0 requires that you answer the question of "why are you paying nothing?", $5 gives you access to FLACs, and $10+ includes the FLACs and a packaged CD when it comes out.
So I gave $5 and downloaded some flacs, despite never having heard any of his music, because, come on, it's only $5. You can barely buy a gallon of gas for $5, and music is way more important than gas.
There is some music on the Girl Talk myspace page (flash), or you can just download the album.
ZOMG! HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRIAN!
also happy wedding anniversary brian and jenn!
Jill has been running ubuntu on her home machine for about 6 months or so. This weekend, as a birthday gift from her brother, she received an mp3 player, so she had the computer on and was adding music to it (typically the computers are off during the weekend, except when we're watching BSG of course). She started playing games while we were waiting for the battery in the mp3 player to charge, but she got bored. She started kturtle, which is the KDE implementation of the Logo programming language, and asked what it was. I explained, briefly, and she wanted to see how it worked. So I told her to go to the help and to read the manual. Except something went wrong -- she apparently doesn't have the KDE help viewer installed, or she doesn't have the kturtle help or something, so we were stuck. Poking around the menus, I saw "Open Example" and told her that we should try to learn how to write kturtle programs by reading and running the examples. A few little while later, with not very much input from me, she managed to draw a 4x4 grid. And tonight when I called, she confessed that she had been playing with kturtle for the past hour, learning how to open an input window, how variables work, change the font size, and pick random numbers, all by reading the examples.
I was impressed with how the visual feedback helped her work through bugs. Being able to set the speed of the interpreter helped, too. I was also struck at how similar the basics of logo are to Ruby -- a few minor syntax changes ([ and ] for blocks instead of { and }, learn instead of def, etc) and some Shoes glue, and I think you could have a decent ruby version. This is particularly interesting to me because a few people recently have asked what a good way to learn how to program is, and I've been suggesting HacketyHack (HacketyHack uses mozilla, but _why started the Shoes project because mozilla is "just too unwieldy"). I was also struck by, and commented on, the usefulness of having the source code to the example programs. Free software for the major win.
ZOMG! HAPPY BIRTHDAY ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
quietsurrealism!
The new Roots album is fucking amazing.
We had a really good time at Jack and Rebekah's bachelor/bachelorette party. Looking forward to the wedding.
Then, on the way home, I got a ticket for running a red light. Which I totally ran, but only because it was like 1:30am and the only person on this particular road was me (and, uh, the cop). It's the first ticket I've ever gotten.
I replaced by Nalgene bottles with bisphenol a free CamelBak (flash) "Better Bottles". I've heard on and off about BPA being potentially bad for you, but didn't really worry too much about it until Jill brought it up this weekend. Nalgene announced on Friday that they were phasing out their BPA bottles, but I couldn't find any of the BPA free ones at any of the stores I went to in Dayton. The Nalgene bottles have stood up to the test of time surprisingly well (a few weeks ago I broke a lid strap thing for the first time). Hopefully the BPA free versions will as well.
Baby Loves Hip Hop is a collab concept hip hop album for kids. The members are: Chali 2na (from Jurassic 5) as MC T-Rex, Ladybug Mecca (from Digable Planets) as Tracy Triceratops, Wordsworth as Billy Brontosaurus, Scratch (from The Roots) as Teo Pterodactyl, and lastly Prince Paul (who has produced everything from Del tha Funkee Homosapien to De La Soul to Big Daddy Kane) as DJ Stegosaurus. It's also narrated by the lovely and talented Ursula Rucker. You can download a sample track here. Good music targeted toward kids makes me happy. Also, any of my friends who have kids, you should expect this as a gift from me -- baby's first hip hop record. :-)
Walter Bender resigned from OLPC. So did Ivan Krstić. It sounds like they both left because someone at OLPC has forgotten why free software is important.
So most of you probably know about Wanda the Fish, the applet you can add to your Gnome panel on your linux systems. For those of you unfamiliar, it's effectively a system tray program that has a little animated cartoon fish. It's installed by default, but you've got to explicitly add it to your system tray. When you double click on the fish, it gives you a random quote that's generated from a program called fortune. Fortune has a database of a bunch of quotes to pick from.
Most of you also know that I'm responsible for a large Linux-based thin client deployment at one of the larger school districts here in Dayton.
We got a complaint the other day from one of the teachers that the kids were clicking on Wanda over and over and over instead of doing their work, and some of the quotes were very slightly inappropriate (the examples sited included jokes about WASPs and pimps). We talked about it in the IT department and decided that regardless of what the fortunes said, they were distracting the kids, and we needed to address it.
It turns out that it's actually kind of annoying to remove access to wanda (because it's built directly in to the panel, not a separate binary like the other applets). I asked we could just replace the fortunes with one message so you always get the same thing every time you click on wanda. Everyone thought that would be fine.
So now when you click on Wanda anywhere in the district the only quote she'll display is
Stop clicking on the fish and get back to work!
You should go read This New Vulnerability: Dowd’s Inhuman Flash Exploit and Dowd’s Flash Report: What Have We Learned?. (But you're all already doing that because I've been telling you for years that you should read the Matasano blog. Right? Right.)
It’s a weaponized NULL pointer attack that desynchronizes a bytecode verifier to slip malicious ActionScript bytecode into the Flash runtime.
This is pretty fucking amazing. It's been a long time since I've read about something this fucking amazing in the security world.
If you've got Flash installed, well, this is a good argument for not having flash installed, or at least using Gnash, but if you've got it make sure you're running at least version 9.0.124.0. (Going to about:plugins should tell you which version you have).
BTW, if all that goes over your head, just know that a weaponized NULL pointer attack that desynchronizes a bytecode verifier to slip malicious ActionScript bytecode into the Flash runtime is code for it's worse than you can possibly imagine.
During the upgrade we decided to change how some authentication stuff was set up. The net result is that future upgrades will be easier, but we unfortunately lost all the existing email passwords. If you're on the list below, there's a good chance you won't be able to read your email until you contact either brett or myself (or get your hacker SO to do it for you).
beatrice
anami
beth
matthew-work
matthew
jrbl
No mail is getting lost, you just can't access it at the moment.
Oh, and webmail is possibly broken. We haven't tested that yet. But we will soon, after sleeping.
We're doing an upgrade to panacea starting on Friday March 28th at 8:30pm EDT. It should hopefully only take a few hours. Some coordination will happen on freenode in #panacea (or ##panacea or whatever stupid shit freenode does). So far Jason, Brett, and I will be doing the upgrade. Be there or...uh...have panacea be different when you next log in?
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